Droughts and rural households’ wellbeing: evidence from Mexico
Eva Arceo-Gomez,
Danae Hernández-Cortés () and
Alejandro Lopez-Feldman
Additional contact information
Danae Hernández-Cortés: University of California, Santa Barbara
Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 162, issue 3, No 13, 1197-1212
Abstract:
Abstract Climate change could increase the frequency and duration of droughts that affect Mexico. This is particularly worrisome because many agricultural communities in the country are poor and with limited capacities for adaptation. This study estimated the impact of droughts on rural households’ wellbeing in Mexico, specifically on per capita earnings, poverty, and children’s school attendance. To do this, we focused our empirical analysis on the effects of the 2011 drought, one of the worst droughts that have affected Mexico in the past 70 years. Our results provide clear evidence that droughts have a negative impact on rural households’ wellbeing. Households that experienced a drought had lower per capita earnings and were almost 5 percentage points more likely to be poor after the drought than their counterparts. Furthermore, droughts reduced female employment and male school attendance in almost three percentage points. Our results also provide indirect evidence showing that households that are less familiar with relative water scarcity are the ones that are hit hardest during droughts. Droughts are poised to become an additional threat to the wellbeing of rural Mexican households.
Keywords: Adaptation; Household wellbeing; Mexico; Poverty; Rural households; Weather shocks; Welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-020-02869-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:162:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-020-02869-1
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02869-1
Access Statistics for this article
Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe
More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().